Evaluating And Evolving A Screening Library In Academia: The St Jude Approach

The quality of lead compounds is a key factor for determining the success of chemical probe and drug discovery programs. Given that high-throughput screening (HTS) continues to be a dominant lead generation paradigm, access to high-quality screening libraries is crucial for such efforts in both industry and academia. Here, we discuss the strategy implemented a decade ago to build from scratch one of the largest compound collections in academia, containing similar to 575 000 carefully annotated small molecules, and a recent multidisciplinary effort designed to further enhance the collection to meet our research demands for the next decade.